


Hades Needs A Vacation

by amato_amateur



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-11
Updated: 2020-02-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:55:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22665094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amato_amateur/pseuds/amato_amateur
Summary: Hades has worked so, so hard, for an eternity, building the Underworld, keeping things moving. His wife comes and goes, but he's never entirely been able to escape the grind.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	Hades Needs A Vacation

The underworld groans. Hades knows the cadence. He’s shaped it over millenia.  
All the time, it ticks away, processing the dying, shunting them into lanes of traffic, eventually spitting them out, somewhere, generating constant afterlives and constant, constant problems for him to deal with. It’s monotonous, with one or two occasional shocks-- like damned Sisyphus-- that make ripples for too long.

But sometimes she comes. His wife, his love. Persephone, the spring, the growth, comes to the caverns and the rivers and to him. The man of stone, ice, and bone. Hades had no bend to him, but Persephone bends as a way of life, and she can breathe a little flexibility into him, during the winter. And it’s a good thing too-- winter is a busy time, he needs her calm sweetness.  
He needs her. Without her, he stagnates. He calcifies. After one long summer and a warm fall, she had come diving down (late) and he had smiled as he always did when he saw her-- and felt his face crack. Just a little, but enough that they’d laughed about it after a moment of shocked surprise.

He’s never surprised except by her.

He knows his systems. His systems know him. He has underlings. There are so many committees in the Underworld. So many. And all of them are busy, busy, busy, churning out a steady stream of reports and decisions which go up and down respectively, trickling steadily until they reach either Hades (at the top) or the workers (at the bottom). At the bottom, the decisions have accumulated at an almost exponential rate, an infinite number of decisions, every issue resolved. At the top, the reports and the questions have been consolidated to an amount that is consistently just beyond Hades’ ability to confidently handle them.

It’s a routine. A grind. 

And one day, he looks at his existence and the existing architecture of his bureaucracy. He thinks about his wife (who has her own territory! her own responsibilities! plenty of her own work! and still comes down to his caves for half the year and breathes!).  
Maybe, he thinks, if I just pushed a little harder, I could clear some space for myself. Just a week. Maybe a month.  
Maybe I could take a vacation.  
So he plans in every spare half-second he can snatch, that winter, taking care to keep everything spinning on. He hypothesizes and sketches new flowcharts, one line at a time before his attention is snatched away to some very important matter, like the most recently acquired workers’ ideas about striking and labor rights, or like his wife. He’ll always give his attention to his wife. That was the deal.   
But when she turns away for a moment, his mind snaps back to his plans.  
And when spring comes, he waves her goodbye and turns back to his systems, cracks his knuckles, and gets into it with his very deepest reserves of strength. The additional strain is almost too much. Shuffling bureaucracies, investing the trustworthy at every level with just a little more work, offloading his burden in a billion little ways.  
He arranges it with the plague, weather, and war gods. He speaks to the harvest and famine gods. He makes bargains he may regret later. All to set aside one month-- a whole month!-- around midsummer, when--  
he can leave. 

The clock starts and he’s at the door, not a moment wasted.

And--  
What a feeling! Stepping out into the WORLD!

Do you have any idea how long it’s been since Hades has been among someone else’s creation? 

The Underworld has its own beauty, in a way. There are subtleties to it, contrasts of smoothness and sharpness, quiet shifts in color that almost leap out at you in a certain light, and the layout itself has been perfected over untold years. The efficiency is a joy to behold, for those who can appreciate it. And Hades appreciates it. He knows every pebble of the Underworld, the paths worn in Asphodel, the shining shores of Elysium, every little spike and shadow in Tartarus. And all of it is his.  
Have you ever been entirely surrounded by your own work? I bet you haven’t. Stood in a room where you sanded every board, planned and constructed the walls, the roof, the floor, accounted for the weather and the geography and the intended use, painted and reinforced them, and built the furniture? From scratch, no template, no help. With a constant stream of thoughts in the back of your mind, reconsidering the choices you made, criticizing your design, regretting the things you didn’t know when you began, planning the time when you can fix it and start the cycle again.  
Hades has lived that since he started in the business. He couldn’t work his way up. He was up.  
Everything he saw was his. His design, his mistake, his responsibility, like his own mind made metaphysically solid.  
And now?  
Everything is new.

For a moment, he understands the sensation of having the wind knocked out of him.

He feels surprise. It flings his head backward, widens his eyes, raises his hands and laughs through his mouth. There’s not a thing here that’s familiar! Every blade of grass, every shine of light, and all the creatures are continuing on their paths unaffected by him. He isn’t responsible for a bit of it, none of it is his own.  
He is lighter than he’s ever been. He could stretch as far as the shining grey sky above him. What a color! What an incredible shimmering rainbow of iridescents, reflecting on everything he sees! Like every pearl in his domain, like the glint of the subterranean rivers, like the brightness he once saw in Persephone’s face. 

Yes.  
Persephone. This was her world.  
Oh, why hadn’t he done this before? Why hadn’t it occurred to him? So simple, and so right.  
Laughter leaping in him, novelty surrounding him, Hell behind him, Hades set off to find his wife.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Comments are hugely appreciated!


End file.
